2/23/14

Zora Neale Hurston and Folklore, Part II

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These notes continue remarks written a few years back to accompany the reading of Hurston's Mules and Men. Thinking about Gee's Bend, Alabama, Son House and Big Mama Thornton.

It is very important that we try to understand how it is that a
population is able to survive and even prosper in limited ways under a fascist
regime or even conditions of terrorism. The situation in the South for African
Americans from the turn-of-the-century, at least in some locations, meets the
criteria for terrorism or fascism in my own mind.

In looking at the work that Hurston and other “folklorists” tried to do
in setting down and preserving various evidence of African American folk
cultures at the turn of the century through the 40s and 50s, I am assuming that
culture is the appropriate word to use in describing almost everything that
these people tried to do to make themselves comfortable or happy, other than
that which was directly compelled by the forces that controlled their economic
lives.

I
am also assuming that culture, to the degree that it was controlled by the
dominant group of plantation owners, Klansmen, police or vigilantes, etc., would
be hegemonic, that is a complex and not easily detectible hybrid incorporating
social, political and economic control into a repertoire which may include some
ultimately contradictory and ambivalent emotional responses to that population
officially either held in contempt or ostracized.

There is no way in the world that Hurston could have traveled alone down
the back roads of the South as much as she did without understanding exactly
what she was dealing with in this regard.Indeed, she left us amble documentary evidence of her various strategies
for dealing with and manipulating the dominant Jim Crow culture when it
attempted to stand in her way.

So successful was she and other cultural workers, folklorists,
performers etc. at maintaining a subversive kind of control over the dominant
culture that it becomes fascinating to consider the degree to which the
dominant classes (plantation owners, work supervisors, even prison guards and
wardens on occasion) actually made no attempt whatsoever to alter or suppress
subterranean cultural expression among peasants and/or the urban working class,
and may have even encouraged such cultural expression, claimed it as their own,
seen it as reassuring or in some cases, imitated it.This is what was happening with a great many
white musicians by the time Elvis Presley came along in Tupelo, Mississippi,
one of the centers of musical culture in the 50s.

Again, the process of imitation isn’t a simple one in that white
musicians brought cultural remnants to the table as well.It is just that the folk cultures of blacks
and whites in certain regions of the South were so thoroughly mixed over an
extended period of time and over the course of several generations of activity
that it would be difficult if not impossible to say for sure about the root
derivation of each feature, whether it was more reminiscent of African or
European precursors. Not that these
cultures were racially integrated but only that the performers in each culture
may have had slightly more mobility than the rest of the population.

Hurston was interested in substantiating irrefutable evidence of
humanity, to counter racial superiority claims of whites.To her, it seems clear upon reading Valerie
Boyd’s biography, Wrapped in aRainbow, human
meant African or African Diasporic.It
is also clear that she thought of manifestations of African Diasporic
influences as signs of cultural genius, although I haven’t found any place
where she explains why she considers this to be the case.It appears as though she simply assumed that
it was axiomatic that if African American culture derived substantially from
African cultural retentions despite the onslaught of the Middle Passage,
slavery and Jim Crow, it was because that culture was artistically and
aesthetically of superlative quality.Come to think of it, once you put it like that, maybe such an assumption
can be seen as self-evident, that a culture that could survive such an
onslaught would have to be in some sense “superior.”Certainly, superior I think, to whatever it
was that Europeans and Africans had left behind in the old country.

I’ll
say this: I think that African American culture had a resilience and capacity
for preserving self-regard, community, vitality, health and self-love despite
oppression that few cultures have been shown to exhibit.

Hurston thought these elements of genius were most evident in live
performance.If she had had access to
more film, she might have chosen that medium more.There are a number of films of her
research.I have thus far found only one
that I can show (one of which I showed in class this week) although they are
probably all at the Library of Congress, and perhaps even accessible online by
now (need to check that).Indeed,
Hurston again and again insisted that performance was the preferable way in
which to experience these folkloric materials.She repeatedly formed performance groups and mounted performances
wherever she went.Right up until the
end, she was still hoping to take Broadway by storm.And indeed, it appears wherever her dancers
and singers and musicians got a chance to perform their repertoire, there was
universal admiration and approval.But
somehow nobody ever loved it enough to put any substantial money into it, or
the people who did love it, didn’t have the money.

But it is important that the kind of thing that Hurston wanted to share
with the world wasn’t so far from the overall cultural context of African
Americans doing musical and dance performance on the theatrical stage on
Broadway, off Broadway, in their own theatres regionally, in Europe, in the
Caribbean and the Pacific Islands, internationally, and on the so-called chitlin
circuit.I wouldn’t be surprised if
their tours included some locations on the continent of Africa as well,
although I haven’t found any confirmation of that yet because black performers
were some seriously nomadic, roaming folk.

I am a writer and a professor of English at the City College of New York, and the CUNY Graduate Center. My books include Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), Invisibility Blues (1990), Black Popular Culture (1992), and Dark Designs and Visual Culture (2005). I write cultural criticism frequently and am currently working on a project on creativity and feminism among the women in my family, some of which is posted on the Soul Pictures blog.